In 1975 a team of Japanese scientists discovered a strain of
Flavobacterium, living in ponds containing
waste water from a
nylon factory, that was capable of digesting certain byproducts of
nylon 6 manufacture, such as the linear dimer of
6-aminohexanoate, even though those substances are not known to have existed before the invention of
nylon in 1935. Further study revealed that the three
enzymes the
bacteria were using to digest the byproducts were significantly different from any other enzymes produced by other
Flavobacterium strains (or any other bacteria for that matter), and not effective on any material other than the manmade nylon byproducts.
